


Bad Blood

by yorkisms



Series: Lazer Team Playlist Fics [1]
Category: Lazer Team (2015)
Genre: (herman...), Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, also gay. very gay., angst angst angst, canon medical issues (for Herman), lots of headcanons, referenced Hagan/Mindy's mom but it's not the focus here, stretches from the accident to just after lt 1, teen alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 14:23:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7687879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yorkisms/pseuds/yorkisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?</i>
  <br/>
  <i>It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?</i>
</p><p>Or: The life and times of Anthony Hagan, former jock turned cop, and Herman Mendoza, former jock turned town failure-slash-drunk, and how they were former friends and maybe former almost-lovers.</p><p>And maybe towards the end, some aliens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Blood

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a spiritual successor to When the War Came, except this was inspired by Bad Blood by Bastille (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoNYlV07Cf8) 
> 
> Yeah, I told my friend Kerry I'd write more gay dads, but I'm...not sure this is what xe wanted.

_We were young and drinking in the park_

_There was nowhere else to go_

_And you said you always had my back_

_Oh but how were we to know_

The stars in the middle-of-nowhere (located just outside of Milford, Texas) are bright and shining and if one heads into middle-of-nowhere away from the military base, there's no light pollution, and is a great place for two teenagers to run.

They're escaping their own fame, both of them on the football team for Milford High, both part of the Mustangs' unprecedented win-streak. They've just escaped the after-party of their most recent game, which they both found entertaining, but not as good as coming here. 

Actually, they're both lying down, sore and tired and running high on the idea that they're seventeen and can live forever. 

And maybe running high on a few beers. 

The slightest provocation makes them both laugh, looking up at the night sky rather than each other.

"Tony," says Herman Mendoza, of eighteen years one month and three days, to Anthony Hagan, of seventeen years eleven months and twelve days, "I could get used to this."

Herman clears his throat. 

"I got an offer from Oregon."

Hagan sputters with surprise. "You what?"

"Yeah," Herman says, and his grin is audible. "Full ride. And a starter position on the team."

"That's-- that's amazing."

"Where are you thinking of going?"

Hagan sighs. "I'm not sure if I'm leaving Milford, really."

"Buzzkill," Herman says affectionately, elbowing him. "You've gotta."

"Haven't really got any offers like that, and I don't exactly have the funds to-"

"C'mon," Herman says, convincingly, in the way that he damn well knows weakens Hagan's will every time. 

"You can try."

"Yeah," Hagan says sardonically, unconvinced. "If we make it through the season undefeated, maybe."

"You gonna make that happen?"

"Are you?" 

They look at each other before Herman laughs. 

"I can try," Hagan finally says, and Herman elbows him again. 

"You're gonna."

_That these are the days that bind you together, forever_

_And these little things define you forever, forever_

Hagan hears through the grapevine that Herman's leg isn't healing properly.

Normally that's the kind of thing he would have heard from Herman himself, but that doesn't seem likely.

From the moment of the accident, things had changed. Nobody had raced to Herman's side faster than Hagan, but Herman had met his eyes with fire and hissed "get away" in a voice so icy and hard that Hagan had pulled back, surprised and hurt. 

He waits outside the hospital room, but Herman's parents and the nurses corroborate that Herman doesn't want to see him. 

He knows that people are talking, but he just doesn't care. He doesn't sleep, the first day, at least 24 hours pass before he loses consciousness on a chair outside the room. He cries until he can't anymore, he throws up twice, he shakes like it's cold even though it's a warm spring and the hospital is sweaty. 

No one really comes to get him out of there, out of a mix of pity and shame. At least, not for a few days, maybe a week, it all passes in a blur. 

Marina, one of the cheerleaders he's met once or twice or maybe more, is the first person other than the staff to dare to talk to him. He's a mess, hasn't changed his clothes in days, unwashed, dark circles and red eyes.

She's going to college in Dallas in a month, she says. Pre-law. She drags him back to the house her parents put her up in on the edge of town, not that he's in much mood to protest. 

She starts gentle, by convincing him to sleep and eat and maybe take a shower occasionally. Then she starts dropping ideas. One day, two weeks on from when she brought him home, she drops an idea that actually manages to tug at his brain. 

"Milford PD is looking for recruits," she says in that slow way of hers. She tosses paperwork on the table. 

"You could always try." 

When she leaves to run errands, he picks up the papers. 

At the station, he can tell everyone recognizes him, but he tries (and tries very hard) not to let it show.

The officer at the desk reads his papers, then looks up at him.

"We don't pass half-asses."

That's when the name starts to stick, as he goes around, _half-ass_ , and so he grits his teeth and waits as every use of it lessens the sting.

_All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?_   
_It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?_

On the other hand- it's hard for Herman to let go. At first, he's just in pain, so much pain, in fact, that everything seems fuzzy and muted. Or, if not muted, silenced in comparison to how much it god-damn hurts. 

And then when the pain starts to end, the doctors come in and take x-rays of his leg and write down information and mumble to each other before they inform him that he's torn some nerves in his leg (this is why it hurts) and that because of this he will have a permanent limp, which implicitly means that he will never play again. 

That's when every emotion leading up to that point turns to bile. Absolute bile, and because there is no other target for it Herman blames Hagan with everything he's got. Forget, he thinks angrily to himself, that I thought we could be more than friends. 

A betrayal- as this is- is a betrayal. 

The doctors think he may need a cane, but they're not quite sure. Herman snorts. What kind of eighteen-almost-nineteen-year-old uses a goddamn cane. He relents when even getting out of bed is bleeding painful.

The cane stays for twelve months, then twenty-four, then thirty-nine.

By the time Herman's working away from the cane, a slow and painful process, he hears that Hagan is a police officer, now. That he's marrying that cheerleader, Marina, who's getting into law school in the fall, and surely they'll have a picture-fucking-perfect southern white life with two and a half kids. 

Herman spits. At least he likes the nickname. 

By God, he's gonna make sure no one ever forgets it. Forgets what happened to him, and whose fault it really was.

_If we're only ever looking back_

_We will drive ourselves insane_

_As the friendship goes resentment grows_

_We will walk our different ways_

Marina and Hagan have a daughter and ten years together before they divorce.

Herman has a moment of schadenfreude when he hears, certainly, he knows that Anthony Hagan is the furthest thing from infallible. 

Herman, though, doesn't have a job, per-se. He jumps around, really, whatever people who remember (and pity) him will pay him for. 

No physical labor, though. His leg still hurts from time to time, when it's too cold or too hot and it implicitly throbs, of course, whenever he sees Hagan.

The Milford PD is not all it's cracked up to be, if you ask Hagan. The teasing has not improved, as he hoped it would, with time, and even his superiors buy into it. And his inferiors. So, everyone.

The younger ones tend to think it's a whatever-thing, an old person nickname that they can throw around because everyone is doing it.

The older ones think it's a jab, to keep him on his toes, a not-so-friendly piece of coworker banter.

But when he tells Marina over the years that the sting lessens with time, he's very much lying, because it never does. And in the city limits of Milford, there's one definition the former friends can agree on.

 _half-ass_ ( **haf** -ass, **hahf-** ) _n., 1. A person who lets their best friend (and maybe something else) down, 2. Anthony Hagan._

Truth is truth is truth.

_But those are the days that bind us together, forever_

_And those little things define us forever, forever_

Herman goes out of his way to mess with his ex-best-friend, ex-crush, ex-almost-boyfriend. 

He doesn't have the care to hunt Hagan down, mind you, but he has no moral hangup driving through parking lots a little too fast when he knows Hagan is looking, or bonus for driving the wrong way. 

There's only so many cops in Milford, so every time he breaks a law he knows Hagan will hear about it and that it'll definitely get on his nerves.   
Herman isn't sure why it does. 

(Hagan, for his part, just wants his ex-crush, ex-teammate, ex-best-friend, to try. He doesn't feel deserving of any forgiveness- he gave up on the idea of finding that when Marina took him to her house from the hospital- but all he would like is to forget.)

But it happens, it happens again and again and it happens when Herman (against his will) falls in with the weird kid at Milford High, it happens when Herman finally returns to watch a football game like he swore he never would, and it happens when he has Woody Johnson drive him out into middle-of-nowhere to get drunk and play with fire. 

That's when fate takes the reins and pulls Anthony Hagan and Herman Mendoza back together.

_All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?_

_It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?_

Herman's demeanor vexes and confuses Hagan. There's one question he needs answered to explain everything: is Herman still mad?

That's the impression he's gotten over the years, and yes, he's gotten good at ignoring how the word half-ass hurts most in Herman's voice and how many, many of Herman's offenses were done while looking him in the eye the same way a cat looks at its owner before batting vases off the table and watching them shatter on the floor. 

Hagan is older, now, he's not seventeen years, eleven months, and twelve days anymore. He's some forty-seven years, six months, and eighteen days. He's got a child, and a job, and lived a mundane life that he didn't love but doesn't regret, either. He's not the world's biggest fan of who Marina became (god save him, people think, that he ever loved* her), but he doesn't regret being with her. 

He doesn't regret Mindy, who he most certainly loves, the daughter whose image wracks him with guilt whenever someone reminds him if he fails- if Herman, Zach, and Woody fail- the world will die. She will die. 

Hagan wanted to forget. He always wanted, but he's never gotten what he wants. 

_And I don't wanna hear about the bad blood anymore_

_I don't wanna hear you talk about it anymore_

_I don't wanna hear about the bad blood anymore_

_I don't wanna hear you talk about it anymore_

It feels like yesterday that they were in the halls of Milford High, looking at the trophies previous classes had won and watching theirs be added to the annals. It feels like yesterday that they were passing notes in class talking about the next game, the afterparty, who was going to pick up the beer and how Hagan could borrow his dad's truck to take them to the wilderness where it could always be them, as it always was, them, inseparable. 

Today, they're back in the halls of Milford High, on a journey they never could have dreamed, leaving Earth in mere days. 

The alien, defeated; the battle's won but not the war. 

Today, they both came at the same time to look at a picture of their team from nineteen-eighty-something, a picture of them with their arms around each other and grinning like there's nothing in the world, the universe, like each other.

Puppy love is like that. 

Hagan speaks first. 

"I'm sorry." 

His voice is hoarse, for all he knows he's seventeen-eighteen and sitting outside Herman's room in the hospital again, waiting for a single piece of news. 

"Took me a long time to realize this," Herman says slowly, "But god-damn, you were seventeen." 

Hagan looks at him, surprised, and Herman's eyes are closed, arms folded, small smile on his face. 

"I was, wasn't I?"

"So was I."

And they both know that's not meant literally, but figuratively, and it means _we were too young._

We were too young, and we were too unfortunate. 

Hagan registers the feeling of Herman holding his hand through the shield gauntlet, and his throat goes dry. It's a more dramatic sort of shock than Marina ever made him feel. He feels the universe opening up before him, an old feeling returning, a curse over them both lifted.

"You're forgiven."

_All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?_   
_It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?_

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, if you've got a song for my lazer team playlist, why not drop it to me in an ask at mttbrand-suffering on tumblr? I may make it a songfic!


End file.
